Since we began work on this issue, I've had an image in my mind that I have tried to force on the rest of the team in some way—our cover artist to our event planner—and it has, like many of my ideas, found its rightful place in the editor’s note. The image is of a stool alone on a stage in the spotlight. The ubiquitous and bare-bones tools of the performer: the stand-up comedian, the singer-songwriter, the one-man-show-er. I say the image has found its rightful place here because this note, full of performance, is my version of a monologue.
While editing the pieces for this issue, I went to a gallery and watched a video installation by Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi. In the piece, titled Suspension, we see gymnasts, all women of colour, in the moments right before starting their routines. I immediately thought of performance, but these moments are so thoroughly unperformed, just genuine rituals belonging to the gymnasts: murmuring to themselves, maybe in prayer; one foot to the other, maybe preparing for lightness. They are looking ahead, to a spot off the screen, to the other corner of the mat.
Unlike in sports, we don't usually see the actor offstage before they walk into the lights, or on set right before action is called. But we can imagine it. And this moment is as essential to the performance as the performance itself.
There's another beguiling video I saw this summer, an edit by the anonymous Instagram user, @le__dauphin, of second-long clips of actresses on Charlie Rose. She's in front of a black background, under a spotlight, looking ahead to a point off screen. It captures the moment when Rose introduces her, right before she speaks, but when she has already started her show. It’s the purest distillation I've seen of stardom: both natural presence and the ability to perform yourself.
The brilliant pieces in this issue probe this moment, the gap between the self and the character. The actress who exorcises something on screen that could not be unleashed, without cost, in real life. Or the performances that barely veil the actor’s true feelings: exhaustion, indifference, irritation. Or the mysterious, endearing performance of dogs. Or the performance of the writer, the self-conscious negotiations of persona when you pitch and revise and refine, until you come across more clearly.
Like our cover art so strikingly renders: whenever we leave the house, we are wearing masks of ourselves, maybe in an effort to hide, but there is vulnerability in this performance too. Through this façade, we are showing the world who we are trying, sometimes desperately, to be. And although it's up to others to deem if we are pulling it off, there is satisfaction that we have been brave enough to take the stage.
There isn't a curtain to come down or a band to play me out at the end of this note. But I'll take a kind of bow here anyway, ever grateful that you come to see our show and watch us perform.
—Gabrielle Marceau
Editor-in-Chief, In The Mood Magazine